This project considers the genre of memoir in conversation with current work in trauma theory and discourse. I analyze two “traumatic” memoirs – Helene Cooper’s House at Sugar Beach and Dave Eggers’ What is the What – in order to contend that the genre is in a unique position to expose the limits of empathy in traumatic representation.

Scholars of identity and narrative continue to debate what constitutes a life story. This presentation examines narrative arc’s place in schemas of performers and audiences who are primed to “Tell a story” and proposes hypotheses to be tested with content analysis methods.

Scholarly studies on the Italian autobiography have focused almost exclusively on eighteenth-century male writers, while little attention has been paid to pre-nineteenth-century autobiographies authored by women. I attempt to trace the making of the Italian women’s autobiography by focusing on four autobiographical narratives produced between the mid-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries by women of vastly different social and cultural backgrounds.